There were strong signs across the U.S. that the number of people who attended the Women's March on Washington on Saturday topped those who gathered on Friday to watch U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration.
But as over a million people around the world protested in solidarity with events in Washington, both the president and his press secretary took aim Saturday at the media for "attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration" and claimed a bigger turnout than the available data suggests.
The U.S. capital's metro subway stations and train cars were full in many locations on Saturday, while ridership on Friday was well off the numbers from Obama's first inaugural.
Interim D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said on Independence Avenue, "The crowd stretches so far that there's no room left to march."
Metro tweeted Sunday that 1,001,616 trips were taken on the rail system the day of the Women's March on Washington. Metro spokesman Dan Stessel had said that on Friday, the day of Trump's inauguration, just over 570,000 trips were taken on the rail system.
No official estimates of the crowd size at the march were immediately available, but the demonstrators appeared to easily exceed the 200,000 organizers had initially expected.
Kevin Donahue, Washington's deputy mayor for public safety and justice, said on Twitter that organizers of the march increased the turnout estimate to over half a million.
On Sunday, Trump and his staff continued their attacks on the media, with adviser Kellyanne Conway saying it was unfair for the media to compare the crowds to President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration.
"Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall," Spicer's statement readTrump's press secretary said, without evidence, in a statement released Saturday, that the media intentionally framed pictures and video to make the event look smaller.
"These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong."
Trump said the inauguration crowd looked to be about 1.5 million people. The National Park Service doesn't provide an official estimate, but such a figure is highly dubious. Other events that filled more of the Mall have not drawn a crowd of that size.
Spicer also stated: "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe."
It is not known how many people watched the ceremony on television around the globe, but in the U.S., Nielsen estimates 31 million viewers watched TV coverage.
The 2009 inauguration of Obama, who became the nation's first black president that year, was watched by nearly 38 million viewers, the second-highest number since Nielsen began compiling such figures with Richard Nixon's 1969 oath of office.
Only Reagan drew a bigger U.S. TV inauguration audience, with nearly 42 million viewers tuning in to see the California Republican sworn in for his first term in 1981.
Trump's total was greater than both swearings-in of Democrat Bill Clinton — 29.7 million and 21.6 million — and the second inauguration of Obama, who drew an average audience of over 20.5 million in 2013, Nielsen said.
Over 1 million protested Trump worldwide
In a global exclamation of defiance and solidarity on Saturday, more than a million people had rallied at women's marches in the Washington, D.C., and cities around the world. The more than 600 "sister marches" around the world were held in conjunction with the main Women's March on Washington.
Many of the women came wearing pink, pointy-eared "pussyhats" to mock the new president. Plenty of men joined in, too, contributing to surprising numbers everywhere from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles, to Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, London, Prague and Sydney.
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